SOURCE: “Compelling, If Sloppy, Feminist Manifesto,” in The Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1999, p. E3.

In the following review, Linfield offers tempered assessment of The Whole Woman.

Germaine Greer may be a lunatic. But after years of cautious, tepid yuppie-feminism—of being told that women do, or at least can, have it all, and that “it” is well worth having—a lunatic may be just what we need. Many of Greer's more bizarre opinions will probably bewilder, if not appall, large groups of readers. (While she considers mammogram programs sadistic, she supports female genital mutilation.). Yet though too much of The Whole Woman—Greer's follow-up to her 1970 manifesto The Female Eunuch—is sloppily argued, badly sourced and easy to mock, it is, in its essentials, right on.

First, a rightfully angry Greer argues, feminism is international and egalitarian, or it is nothing; the prosperity of a few select women...